The essay focuses on the poetry of Elias Sehlstedt (1808–1874) and its relation to modernity. In his own lifetime, Sehlstedt was a widely read poet, much appreciated for his sense of humour and his witty travesties of poets such as Bellman, Franzén, Lenngren, Wallin and Tegnér. During the 20th century, Sehlstedt was dismissed as a poet of bourgeois contentment, and fell into oblivion. Nevertheless, his poetry offers an advantageous starting-point for a discussion of nineteenth century bourgeois mentalities. The object of the essay is to relate this aspect of Sehlstedt’s work not only to the private sphere of the middle class, but also to the market and to the political sphere.

Theoretically, the essay relates to Matei Calinescu’s discussion of the antagonistic relation between the bourgeois idea of modernity and the aesthetic one, to Victor Svanberg’s discussion of Swedish middle-class realism, and to the concept of the structural transformation of the public sphere developed by Jürgen Habermas.

In his poetry, Sehlstedt praises the modest yet comfortable life of the middle-class. He pays tribute to family values and to jovial social life. In both cases, his outlook is strikingly narrow. The current rapid transformation of the Swedish society through industrialization, urbanization and technological progress is made invisible, and can only be perceived indirectly. In addition to the general escapist tendency, the theme of financial worries is an example of this. Sehlstedt’s use of comic punch-lines often serves the same escapist purpose; smoothly obscuring modernity by means of laughter. To the modern reader, they nevertheless point out the very threats of modernity they were supposed to veil.

Claes Ahlund, A Militarization of the Mind: Swedish Literature and the First World War

The essay suggests that the literature of the First World War does not begin with the actual outbreak of the war in 1914, but much earlier. Anticipation of the coming war is a recurrent theme in Swedish literature during the preceding decades; attitudes varying from nationalist enthusiasm to pacifist and anti-militarist abhorrence. On both sides, however, ambivalence and contradiction are characteristic features. Among the authors discussed in this context are Nils Gottfrid Björck ("Sigvald Götsson", 1896–1891), Verner von Heidenstam (1859–1940), Iwan Aminoff (1868–1928) and Frida Stéenhoff (1865–1945).

Anticipation of a coming war occur in poetry as well as in drama and what can be termed the invasion story, a genre increasingly popular in the decades between the Franco-Prussian War in 1870–1871 and the outbreak of the Great War in 1914. The invasion story typically tells of a successful future invasion by a hostile nation that proves armaments and military training to have been totally insufficient. Particularly important in setting the standard for the invasion story was the Battle of Dorking (1871), written by Sir George Tomkyns Chesney. In the following decades invasion stories were written in–and translated into–many languages in Western Europe. The Swedish contributions include Hur vi förlorade Norrland ("How Norrland was lost", 1889), Hvarför vi förlorade slaget vid Upsala ("Why we lost the battle of Upsala", 1890), Med vapen i hand. Romantiserad skildring af vårt kommande krig ("At arms: a romantic story of our coming war", 1901–1902), and two invasion stories written by the same author, Iwan Aminoff: När krigsguden talar ("When the War-God speaks", 1912), and Invasionen ("The Invasion", 1912).

The literature of the decades preceding 1914 shows that the vision of a coming war was gradually becoming more substantial. The premonitions of war can be described as a dark undercurrent in a period otherwise characterized by technological and scientific progress as well as an optimistic view of the development of civilization. It is an undercurrent related either to nationalistic/quasi-religious and social darwinist conceptions of war as a positive factor in the history of civilization, or to pessimistic ideas of decadence and degeneration. In the war-literature before the war, there are pacifist novels as well as romantic and heroic stories; anti-militarist poetry as well as versified nationalist propaganda, urging the readers (and the authorities) to prepare for glorious and heroic war.

The second section of the essay deals with reactions to the war in nationalist magazines and children's literature in Sweden during the autumn of 1914. Far from giving an accurate picture of the realities of war, the journalists describe it as an adventure full of heroic opportunities. Neutral Sweden being excluded from direct participation in the warfare, many writers use history as a means to raise nationalist sentiment. Supposedly heroic deeds of the Swedish 17th and 18th century are typically set up as inspiring examples.

In the third and final section of the essay, the attitudes to the war in poetry published in right-wing, liberal, and socialist daily papers are discussed. The martial enthusiasm, predominant among conservative writers and right-wing papers in the early months of the war, in many cases is gradually replaced by a weariness of war. In the poetry published in the conservative Nya Dagligt Allehanda, however, the romantic attitude to war is maintained to the bitter end. Due to the civil war in Finland, heroic and romantic contributions even increase during 1918. The liberal daily Dagens Nyheter, on the other hand, at all times keeps a reserved and critical position. The radical socialist Brand has the critical attitude towards war in common with the liberal daily. The poetry published in Brand differs from that of Dagens Nyheter above all in focusing not only on the senseless suffering and the immense costs of war, but also on the question of responsibility; targeting capitalists, the monarchy and the clergy alternately.

Claes Ahlund, Krig och kultur i konservativ och radikal belysning. Annie Åkerhielm och Frida Stéenhoff från sekelskiftet till första världskriget. (War and Culture in a Conservative and a Radical Light: Annie Åkerhielm and Frida Stéenhoff from the Turn of the Century to the First World War.)

The purpose of the essay is to discuss the conceptions of war and of contemporary society and culture put forward in the writings of two diametrical political opposites: the conservative Annie Åkerhielm (1869–1958) and the radical feminist Frida Stéenhoff (1865–1945). Åkerhielm and Stéenhoff both engaged in the debate on war and culture by publishing a number of pamphlets and polemic articles, but they were also writers of fiction. Åkerhielm published novels, short stories and poetry; Stéenhoff, a number of plays, but also some novels.

Annie Åkerhielm and Frida Stéenhoff represent different political parties: Åkerhielm, the conservative and pro-German nationalists; Steenhoff, the radical liberal pacifists. Åkerhielm advocates the value of war and stresses the individual’s duty to subordinate himself to the state, opinions closely related to those of anti-democratic and anti-liberal thinkers such as Rudolf Kjellén and Werner Sombart and propagated as "The Ideas of 1914". Stéenhoff, on the other hand, upholds a radical interpretation of the tradition of the Enlightenment, emphasizing the rights and liberty of the individual, including women, and embracing an optimistic theory of evolution. This makes her a pronounced representative of the antagonistic tradition, "The Ideas of 1789", identified by Kjellén as a major threat to the well-being of the nation.

The outbreak of the war, being a major setback for international cooperation and the peace movement, temporarily caused Frida Stéenhoff to mistrust her own faith in progress and the final triumph of her ideals of love, peace, and liberty. At the end of the war, Annie Åkerhielm suffered a similar dejection caused by the collapse of Germany and the ideals and the culture it represented. Stéenhoff’s reactions are discussed with the novel Ljusa bragder och mörka dåd (1915) ("Bright feats and dark deeds"), the pamphlet "Krigets herrar – världens herrar! (1915) ("The lords of war — the lords of the world"), and the essay "Den nya moralen och Ellen Key som dess tolkare" (1919, "The new morality and Ellen Key as its interpreter") as a point of departure. The discussion of Åkerhielm’s reactions to the war centres on the poem "Emden" (1914), the collection of short stories, Sagor och fantasier (1915, "Tales and fantasies"), the pamphlet Antidemokratiska stämningsstunder (1917, "In the anti-democratic mood"), and the novel Anno Domini (1921).

28. Elin Käck, <em>"Swarming European Consciousness". Europe and Tradition in the Work of William Carlos Williams</em>. Studies in language and culture 27, Department of Culture and Communication, Linköping University. Linköping 2015.Aji, Hélène

The purpose of this article is to study what the French linguist Jean-Jacques Lecercle identified as “the remainder of language” in his book The Violence of Language (1990), and how this is put into play in two poetry books from 2008, by the Swedish poets Anna Hallberg and Lars Mikael Raattamaa. By explicitly challenging a large number of conventions of language, typography, and poetry, these books raise critical issues on how the language system works. These issues specifically concern what parts and aspects of language are allowed into the linguistic system, and what parts and aspects are kept out. These regulatory mechanisms are demonstrated, and scrutinised, in these books — making them meta-critical, as well as ideology-critical. This scrutiny not only shows the relevance of identifying and understanding the mechanisms of exclusion that Lecercle identified among academic linguistics 25 years ago. It also brings them into contemporary society, where they – due to globalisation and technological development — have disseminated, and become part of almost everyone’s daily experience. The results of the article stress how this dissemination increases the societal relevance of the kind of scrutiny undertaken by Hallberg and Raattamaa, and how it can assist in re-ideologising language.